During the first quarter of 2003 VIA technologies announced their chipset support for the new AMD Opteron processor. The AMD Opteron processor is based on AMDs eighth-generation processor core, which marks the introduction of the industrys first 64-bit, x86 technology implementation. This technology protects companies investments in 32-bit applications, while giving them the ability to seamlessly migrate to 64-bit computing. The AMD Opteron processor is designed as a high-performance server and workstation solution for todays most demanding enterprise applications.

Currently AMD offer three chipsets designed for use with the Opteron processors offering support for technologies such as AGP 3.0, HyperTransport and PCI-X. The newly released VIA K8T800 chipset will not only compete with these three AMD chipsets but it will also go head to head with the nForce3 chipset for NVIDIA. The VIA K8T800 has an impressive list of features as it is paired with the VIA VT8237 south bridge. The chipset also features V-RAID, the industry's first integrated multi-configuration Serial ATA (SATA)/RAID controller, enabling RAID 0 and RAID 1 configurations.

This review will not only look at the Opteron 244 processor but it will also reveal the performance of VIAs new K8T800 chipset through the use of the MSI K8T Master2-FAR motherboard. The K8T Master2-FAR supports dual Socket 940 AMD Opteron processors and can accommodate for up to 8GB of DDR333 memory. This ATX form factor board features two serial ports and a further two ATA-133 IDE ports, an AGP Pro slot and expandability via four USB ports and four PCI slots.

While this review will look at both the single and dual performance of the Opteron 244 processor when combined with the K8T800 chipset I must make one thing clear; the majority of results contained in this review are based on non-SMP supportive benchmark software. This means that in most cases you could find that the single processor configuration may be faster than the dual processor configuration. I will do my best to explain why this maybe later on in the review, however for now just keep in mind that most of the benchmark software does not support dual processors.